Debris of dreams

Trade Center brought downtown Manhattan into limelight

CHICAGO (CBS.MW) -- The first tenants to move into One World Trade Center in 1970 were pioneers, of sorts, in taking up residence in the world's then tallest building, hailed as a marvel of modern engineering.

The companies entered a test chamber that would determine whether downtown Manhattan would survive as a world-class financial center.

Thirty years later, a diverse array of tenants representing 430 companies from 28 countries were housed in the complex's twin towers that, while no longer the world's tallest, had succeeded in positioning Lower Manhattan as the financial heart of the globe.

In one terror-filled hour Tuesday, it all disappeared.

$3.2 billion project

The seven-building, 12 million-square-foot World Trade Center was at the height of its popularity, drawing more than 140,000 visitors daily in addition to the 40,000 office tenants.

It also was at the pinnacle in terms of real estate investment; four of its buildings were valued together at $3.2 billion when the owner -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey -- in July granted a 99-year leasehold on the towers and the mall to a venture of Silverstein Properties Inc. and Westfield America Inc.

The deal made the World Trade Center the priciest property in a city of pricey properties. And at least three other real estate companies were still willing to compete for the lease.

Port Authority Executive Director Neil D. Levin said occupancy of the complex in July was at about 97 percent, a historic high. Asking rents for offices and retails shops had doubled in the last five years and the Mall at the World Trade Center had become one of the country's most successful shopping mall, he said.

"Construction of the World Trade Center by the Port Authority was one of the greatest construction feats of the last century. And building prime office space in what was then a deteriorating area achieved its goal -- stimulating economic development, and sparking a renaissance in downtown Manhattan, which still continues," Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg said in July when the lease transaction was announced.

Time capsules

How long it will take to repair the hole in downtown Manhattan created Tuesday is anybody's guess. But the first time around, it took nearly 30 years for the project to move from planning to completion.

New Yorkers first contemplated construction of a world trade facility at the end of WWII. In the late 1950s, the Port Authority took an interest in the project and in 1962 fixed its site on the west side of Lower Manhattan on a superblock bounded by Vesey, Liberty, Church and West Streets.

One of the quirks of the Port Authority's choice was that the New York Stock Exchange, which had been scheduled to be part of the project had it gone on an East River site, was dropped from the deal.

Minoru Yamasaki, a Seattle architect whose other works included the United States Pavilion at the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle and the Terminal Building at the airport in St. Louis, was chosen to design the project; architects Emery Roth & Sons handled production work, and, at the request of Yamasaki, the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson served as engineers.

More than 100 designs were considered for the site, which the Port Authority envisioned containing at least 10 million square feet of space. In order to maximize public plaza space at ground level, Yamasaki settled on the twin towers.

The engineering challenge was tackled by John Skilling and Les Robertson, who crafted an innovative structural model using a rigid "hollow tube" of closely spaced steel columns with floor trusses extending across to a central core. It was similar to the bundled columns used in the Sears Tower in Chicago, which in 1974 topped the Trade Center as the world's tallest building.

The twin towers were designed with strength in mind. They had the world's highest load-bearing walls, built using vertical cantilevered steel tubes. The exterior columns and spandrels welded to the columns at each floor created column free interior spaces between the outer walls and the inner core.

That design was credited with preventing the collapse of the towers following the 1993 terrorist bombing that ripped through the lower levels.

But the structure was nowhere near strong enough to survive the stress of a commercial jet liner tearing apart its upper stories with a firestorm of blazing jet fuel filling its floors and weakening its steel skeleton.

More than 200,000 tons of steel, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 600,000 square feet of glass -- and 30 years of landmark history -- were reduced to several stories of rubble.

Tall tales

In a retrospective, Engineering News Record reported that the size of the glistening 110-story towers -- at 1,362 and 1,368 feet high more than 100 feet taller than the city's other world-record holder the Empire State Building -- was the subject of a joke during the press conference to unveil the landmarks in 1973.

Yamasaki was asked: "Why two 110-story buildings? Why not one 220-story building?" His tongue-in-cheek answer: "I didn't want to lose the human scale."

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